‘NYC from MoMA PS1’ (2010) is a vast watercolour painting—nearly two metres wide—that occupies one wall of the Beverley Art Gallery, the venue for the retrospective exhibition ‘David Remfry RA: A Homecoming’. This twilight metropolitan vista shows the low-lying apartment blocks and industrial buildings of Queens, the gothic girders of Queensboro Bridge, and ghostly skyscrapers in distant Manhattan under a darkly atmospheric washed and warped sky that occupies most of the composition. The painting is a legacy of sorts of an early 2000s exhibition Remfry had at PS1, the Queens branch of the Museum of Modern Art, that he calls ‘an iconic contemporary art place’. Placed with pleasing dissonance between two large windows overlooking springtime Beverley, ‘NYC from MoMA PS1’ reminds us how far Remfry travelled since training as an artist in Hull in the 1960s. And yet, I detect a trace of his formative environment in this picture. This is not the shiny tourist brochure New York—indeed, its ragged charm is redolent of a certain estuary city in East Yorkshire.

David Remfry, ‘New York City from PS1’, Watercolour, 2019, 125 x 193 cm.

One of the many strengths of this excellent sample of Remfry’s long career is that there is an evident throughline, despite stylistic shifts and changes of location, which might be an affinity for the dramatic in everyday life. From elegantly entwined swooning dancers to dignified portraits suffused with the sitter’s presence, his paintings and drawings are resonant and enchanting, revealing a sympathy with and fascination for his subjects, conveyed affectingly through his technical acumen as a draftsman and fluency with media. 

I first met Remfry last summer at his London studio. Remfry’s wife Caroline Hansberry had contacted me after reading an article I wrote about Alice Neel, whose piercing figurative paintings of diverse New Yorkers are thematically analogous to some of Remfry’s works. Remfry was a genial host as we talked over his life and art while perusing paintings on the walls and leafing through a portfolio of pencil studies of denizens of the Chelsea Hotel, New York’s bohemian citadel. The conversation wasn’t recorded and so Remfry’s exhibition in Beverley presented an opportunity to conduct the interview below, which took place in the gallery the day after the opening at the end of March. A seasoned interviewee, Remfry ensured that I test-run my phone recording, which as a rube reporter I hadn’t thought to do, and with impeccable manners successfully quieted intrusive nearby chatter.

Barnaby Haran: So how are you feeling about the exhibition? 

David Remfry: It is a genuine homecoming for me. This is a sort of a retrospective, in a relatively small space. So obviously it’s a very carefully curated one, but it is extraordinarily successfully curated. And I love Hull, you know. I am a Hull man, though I wasn’t born here. All my formative years were spent here.

BH: It’s a very well-arranged show [curated expertly by Dr Gerardine Mulcahy-Parker] that shows great variety over your career. There are so many different aspects to your work. 

DR: I suppose so. There’s a common thread going through it. I pretty much always start with a drawing. Drawing has really been my fundamental practice, and then destruction of drawing, destruction of things. It’s a make and break, a make and remake activity.

BH: ‘Destruction’, that’s a fascinating word.

DR: Well, yes, among the earliest things are a couple of works which relate to my seeing a book which was labelled Primitive Art [by Douglas Fraser, 1962—a copy is on display at the show]. When I bought it in a bookshop in Hull, I saw that the art was anything but primitive. It was a very different art to European art, but it was incredibly sophisticated in its own way. It had meaning, not to me, but it was obviously founded on meaning for the makers of this art. The imagery was so powerful. It was the sort of imagery that affected Picasso and other artists of the 19th century, so why it should be labelled primitive was beyond me. Primitivism is a pejorative word. And it’s equal—different, but equal. 

BH: You can see the influence in some of the earlier works from your art college days.

DR: I scraped into Hull College of Art. The principal let me in on the proviso that I’d got another GCE or something like that. But what I wanted from art school was really to learn to draw and I was very lucky because I met a tutor called Gerald Harding, who made me draw sight-size and at arm’s length. And drawing became a habit. He said ‘David, beware of your facility’. He meant not to get too slick. 

BH: It’s great to know that there was a commitment to learning to draw, which has come in and out of fashion in some respects. 

DR: Yes. You know, drawing should never go out of fashion. It is there as it core. I mean, who was it who said, ‘a line every day’? He didn’t mean cocaine. He meant draw every day. [Subsequent research reveals it was the Greek painter Apelle who in c.400 BC said ‘not a day without a line’].

David Remfry, ‘Alan Cumming’, Graphite on Paper, 2000, 50.8 x 40.6 cm.

BH: Was there a culture at the art school? Were there trends or common methods? 

DR: Not really, not that I was aware of. There was a fellow student who was very interested in Pop, which was just emerging at that time. I liked it, but it wasn’t something that affected my own work. I liked the work of David Hockney, however, because he was doing things which were brave and new. But my hero at that time was Francis Bacon and remains so. 

BH: When did you first encounter Bacon’s work? 

DR: There was one [on display] at the Ferens at one time, but I think it was at an exhibition in London. I was blown away by it.

BH: Was there something that you responded to in Bacon’s work, above Hockney or other artists that you liked?

DR: I couldn’t really articulate what it was. It was not literal, it was figurative. It was—I don’t like the word deconstructing— but it was changing, morphing figures. It’s just the power of it. The composition was also very important to me. He had a unique way of making sort of grids within the painting, unseen grids. He was a master. 

BH: And as you say, the figure remains. In some early works you were leaning towards abstraction. 

DR: I did kind of have an interest in it, particularly American Abstract Expressionism, but I realized if I were to do it then it would be phony. And so my earliest attempts that replicated [Abstract Expressionism]—not replicating, but painting in that way—I just destroyed them. 

BH: What was Hull like in those days? 

DR: Well, I loved Hull. I would go to the Locarno and draw at the same time. I was very interested in people dancing and would go to the Locarno to make surreptitious little drawings. The Locarno was full on. You’d get young fisherman and teddy boys, and there was a little bit of aggro, but a lot of dancing. 

BH: So, you moved to London, quite early in the 1960s?

DR: I thought, I love Hull but if I stay here then I won’t be able to do what I want to do. So, I’ll have to go to London. I bought a van from my dad for 50 quid and loaded it with paintings. I borrowed an easel from Hull College of Art, which they made me sign for. And I told everybody that I was going to London for two weeks and went down the Great North Road. And I thought, I’m not coming back. I’ll do it! I’m going to make it!

Gerald Harding, ‘Vinitas’, Oil on Board, 1961, Collection of Beverley Art Gallery.

BH: And how did you find the process of getting a foot in the door in the London art world? 

DR: It was absurd. I hadn’t any contacts. I stayed in a top floor in a squatty type of flat with about four or five other lads in Earl’s Court. I had jobs as a night cleaner, a telephone operator, and a roofer. But any job I ever had, I put in eight hours of painting and drawing, whatever else I did to make a living. 

BH: You were quickly finding a way of subsidizing the painting.

DR: Well, I didn’t have wealth. I didn’t have any money behind me. So I had to make a living to live. But I didn’t compromise the painting, if you know what I mean. 

BH: Was there a moment that you can you identify as a breakthrough, when you thought that this is now starting to happen? 

DR: Actually, I got a little bit despondent and was a bit rudderless. I admired Bill Coldstream’s work, so I rang up the Slade. They put me through to Bill and I said, ‘could I bring some work to show you?’ And he said, ‘yeah, come along’. He was very kind and encouraged the work. He also put me in touch with the painter Michael Andrews. And Bill was the one that suggested night-time telephone operating. He said, ‘you do the night shift and you’ve got the day for painting’. 

BH: And were there exhibitions or group shows of your work?

DR: I had nothing. It was just really building up the work and confidence.

BH: You first went to New York in the late 1970s. It must have felt quite different to London at that time. 

DF: New York is different to anywhere, isn’t it? Well, it was then. I was just in love with it before I went there, but when I got there, I thought, ‘Oh God, this is amazing’. I didn’t get to live there until 30 years ago. 

Based at the Chelsea Hotel from the mid-1990s, Remfry made pencil studies of many of the residents. Portraits of Quentin Crisp and Ethan Hawke feature in the exhibition. When we met in London I was struck by a picture of Dee Dee Ramone [not on show in Beverley] that shows the musician in a contemplative pose that contrasts with his strung-out street gang persona in the Ramones.

David Remfry, ‘Dee Dee Ramone’, Graphite on Paper, 1998, 51.4 x 40.6 cm.

BH: You drew Dee Dee Ramone, who was someone you knew at the Chelsea Hotel. 

DF:  Yes, he was, because he lived on the floor down and we got chatting quite a lot. And then I drew him. But I did go into his room once and there was this chemical smell, of whatever it was he’s sniffing or on—it was horrible. 

BH: He was a lifelong drug addict, basically.

DF: Yes, but he was a charming bloke. 

BH: He wrote most of the early songs. The lyrics were very witty. 

DF: He called himself ‘the remains’. Because [singer] Joey Ramone had just died, you know.

BH: Did you feel connected to the art scene in New York?

DF: No, not so much. But there was the actual scene, which was more interesting. I was very much influenced by the gay and transgender [scene]. That’s not part of what I am. But it’s visually amazing and the people themselves are amazing. I’ve got as many queer friends as straight. It’s just a different culture. 

BH: Do you see a relationship with that freedom and something you’re looking for in your own work? 

DF: I’m at a point when I can look back and see a thread, whereas [before] I wasn’t seeing it. It was an instinct. I like people. One of the reasons that I like painting people dancing is that it’s an excuse to get them embracing and moving. 

BH: These compositions seem based on observations of people in movement. 

DF: But then they’re all fictions, really. I mean, they were individually real people, but they weren’t in that situation. 

BH: So, you have a real balance between observation and invention.

DF: Invention is a huge part of it. 

BH: The drawings always look like you’ve done studies of people, if not the exact subjects. The training is evident. 

DF: When I was a night-time cleaner in London I used to look at people on the tube and remember them. I did do some drawing, but mostly I remembered them, and I found that I could actually draw them for about a day, then the image sort of faded. So I made a lot of paintings and drawings in tango bars in New York, and different clubs and stuff. I don’t like it to be too formulated because half the fun is making and changing it. Look at the drawing in the sketchbook over there. It’s got Rubens at the Locarno in it—well, actually he wasn’t there!

BH: How did you come to make ‘Club Elite’ and ‘Party’, which depict African American New Yorkers?

DF: Because there’s a vibrant African American community, which went cheek by jowl. I mean, it was brilliant. The African American contribution to American culture is so underestimated. There was a club, about two or three streets along from the Chelsea Hotel, [and the crowd was] almost always all African Americans, and they looked stunning. So it’s a kind of re-creation. 

BH: These paintings certainly capture the energy of New York. I first visited in 1997, staying for a few months. At the time it seemed late to the party, but it was actually a good era, before Rudy Giuliani attempted to suck all the life out of the city. 

DF: No dancing with Giuliani! 

David Remfry, ‘Two Girls on the Shore’, Oil on Board, 1963. 122 x 122 cm.

This is an amusing aside about New York’s notorious former mayor, whose efforts to clean up the city ‘decimated’ its nightlife, yet there is a serious point here about dancing as a liberatory, sensual, and social activity. It strikes me that Remfry’s art suggests a vision of human dynamism and grace, defined by a generous and open-minded sentiment, inevitably if not strategically at odds with the egregious populists who disparage diversity. Yet his work is neither solemn nor precious—there are echoes of Remfry’s conversational wit in some of his more scabrous pictures. When I email to check the time of day of ‘NYC from MoMA PS1’, I am told that it shows New York at dusk, because Remfry ‘doesn’t do dawns’. Indeed, this irreverent sensibility in Remfry’s art might well be a vestige of the character of the city where he started out as an artist. 

Acknowledgements

Thanks to David Remfry and Caroline Hansberry for arranging the interview and for permission to reproduce the images. All photos are by Prudence Cuming. Thanks also to Hannah Willetts, curator at Beverley Art Gallery, for letting us use the space for the interview.